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Topic: Hotter Oven Idea!! (Read 1705 times)

Allright, I was thinking about this problem of higher oven temp. with a conventional stove. I am wondering if this might work:Mind you this will be dependent on where the location of the heat sensor is in the oven, as I do not know.

Take your rack and position it as you always would on or near the bottom depending on your type of oven.

Place your other rack in the middle of the stove and cover with piece of heating reflector shield (or a few sheets of aluminum foil) trying to create a tight seal on the edges.

Now place heat resistant tiles on top of foil trying to also make a tight seal around the wall of the stove and snug against the door when closed. (This will take the breaking of a few 3$ patio tiles to fit the edges.)

Now you have just created a smaller oven that will heat faster with a heat reflector above the pizza with the foil.

This is all in the hope that perhaps the oven sensor is located above and away from the lower part. If this is the case it should be possible to reach higher temps before the sensor registers it. Plenty of time to cook a pizza I would think.

Using both a high quality mercury calibration thermometer and a "contact" thermometer of the sort used to measure the surface temperature of a wood stove, Mr. Sole had determined that he can achieve temperatures of about 700° in a standard home oven set to 500°. How is this achieved?

A ring of fire bricks are stood on end on a soapstone baking sheet. An opening is left in the front wide enough for the peel. The oven heats until the oven thermostat tells it that the air within is 500°. It then shuts off the gas, and start to cool. The air cools much more rapidly than the mass of bricks. Assume that the oven thermostat has a "swing" of 50°. When the air in the oven drops to 450°, on comes the gas to heat the oven once again. At that moment, the bricks would be significantly hotter than the air. The gas keeps cycling on and off in this fashion, each time increasing the temperature of the bricks.

At the point when the bricks and air reach the temperatures defined above, the dough goes into the oven. Mr. Sole states, "...The results astounded me. I have used today's recipe for years, but the spring this time was perhaps 50% greater than ever before..."

The Artisan Baker has built and used this simulated masonry chamber in an electric oven, and it works as well in this situation as in Mr. Sole's gas oven. The photo depicts the setup in an electric oven. As can be seen, the weight of the bricks on the rack causes the rack to sag a bit toward the enter. We suggest that prior to using this setup, a call be made to your oven manufacturer to ascertain the estimated weight load that your rack can handle. Lighter refractory brick may be used to obviate this problem, but they are more difficult to obtain. Half thickness brick are available, and would probably work as well if they are not thinner than the spacings on the rack itself. For example, in the oven depicted here, the rack spacings are approximately 1 inch, but the thinner bricks are about 1/16" narrower, and fall through the spacings.